WASHINGTON — In the pressure cooker that has become Washington over the last several days, undecided lawmakers are feeling the full heat of persuasion politics, a system designed to nudge, entice, scare — or simply grind them down.
It’s known as the fine art — some would say, dark art — of whipping votes, a mainstay of the way Congress works. But rarely is it rung at such a high pitch, as Democrats try to push health care reform over the finish line.
As of Friday evening, estimates put the number of votes in support the bill at as many as 214 of the 216 needed for passage on Sunday, meaning the effort to corral support may go into the weekend.
“It really gets intense…. They’re very meticulous, persistent. It is almost intolerable,” said former Rep. William Frenzel, R-Minn., of the implements applied to recalcitrant lawmakers by congressional whips and the White House legislative affairs team.
“It’s like the vote itself, you can run but you can’t hide,” he said.
There are legendary stories of whipping: Arizona Sen. Dennis DeConcini getting a promise from Jimmy Carter to buy copper for the strategic reserve in exchange for his vote on the Panama Canal Treaty.
Former Republican Majority Leader Tom Delay threatening to find a primary opponent to run against a fence-sitting congressman from Michigan.
Add to that the latest one that suggests the power of, well, personal persuasion: A naked White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel poking his finger in New York Democrat Rep. Eric Massa’s chest in the shower at the House gym.
What is often overlooked is that the process can be both more relentless and more sophisticated — equal parts politics, persuasion and psychology.
“What you’ve got is the ability to call upon leaders as persuaders – committee chairmen, presidents, other prominent people in political and business life. There are labor unions, fund-raisers, donors. You have to use all of these pieces,” said former Rep. David Bonior, D-Mich., himself a storied whip.
“Often on big votes like these it comes down to 40 or 60 members. You develop a profile for each on the levers that you can use to get them to vote the way you want them to vote,” he said.
In the case of the health care vote expected Sunday, one tool that isn’t available is to alter the bill significantly. House members are effectively voting on the Senate version of health care reform passed last December, then a small number of fixes made though a parliamentary procedure known as reconciliation.
Rather than offer to change the bill, Democratic leaders are pitching this as a vote above the political calculations of individual lawmakers — a bill, in other words, too big to fail.
On top of appeals from cabinet secretaries and congressional leaders, Obama has spoken personally to more than 30 swing Democrats since Monday, summoning some to the White House, speaking with others by phone. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, announced he would vote for the bill after getting a ride on Air Force One with Obama.
“You can make the political argument anyway you want, but that’s ancillary. What’s important here is the substance and the right thing to do and what’s important to the country, and that’s the case the President is going to make,” White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said of the message Obama was delivering to uncommitted lawmakers.
But if the president is the big stick, lawmakers are getting smacked with plenty of little ones as well.
The whip operation within Congress is in fact designed as an escalating pyramid of pressure: There are regional whips, chief deputy whips, a senior chief deputy whip, the chief whip, and on top of that, the House leadership, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“It will be just non-stop,” said Congresswoman Diana DeGette, D-Denver, one of eight chief deputy whips. “My staff are calling offices, getting responses, filtering them back to me, then I’m on the floor or on the phone with members talking to them one on one.”
Even with all that, Bonior said the tools at his disposal as a House whip paled in comparison to the persuasive power of the White House.
An opponent of the North American Free Trade Agreement when it was debated by Congress in 1993, Bonior found himself on the opposite side of the Clinton administration on the issue.
“We had about a 25-vote lead going into the last two weeks. The President basically opened the store and people came down to the White House one by one and asked for things — roads, bridges, educational grants, fund-raisers,” Bonior said.
“One by one I watched the lead disappear,” he said. “The power of the presidency is huge.”
Democrats are likely to be extremely careful this time cutting those kinds of deals.
Benefits for their states extracted by a group of swing lawmakers during the debate in the Senate in December turned many voters off the bill.
But as one wavering Democrat after another has announced they will support the bill in recent days, Republicans suspect otherwise.
On Friday, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, charged that the administration had promised Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., a job as NASA administrator and Rep. John Tanner, D-Tenn., the ambassadorship to NATO in exchange for their votes.
Others continue to resist the pressure.
Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., who on Friday received a visit from the widow of former Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., asking him to support the bill, said afterwards that he was still a ‘no.’
“It is a tough when your party and your President believe you have a great duty to deliver for them,” said Frenzel, the former congressman from Minnesota.
“If you have some contrary thoughts, it’s very hard to remind them that they never voted for you and some other people did.”
